From: "Dan Kohn" <dan(_at_)dankohn(_dot_)com>
[...]
Good point. I may have missed something obvious, but my quick read of
RFC 1939 says that POP3 only supports RFC 822 messages. Can someone
comment on POP3's capabilities to deal with 8BitMIME and binary content?
Presumably, at least 8BitMIME is supported, or else POP3 servers would
have been corrupting all sorts of European charsets for years.
"RFC 822 messages" include messages with 8-bit bodies, as RFC 822 has
been updated by RFC 2045. (Ok, you can split hairs between "Standard"
and "Draft Standard" but it isn't useful.) Any reasonable POP
implementation won't corrupt such messages, but there are a lot of
wacky POP implementations.
It's not worth worrying about.
Can conforming IMAP4 implementations only support 7bit bodies? If so,
what the capabilities negotiation to indicate 8BitMIME support?
I am not aware of any IMAP implementations that have a problem with
8-bit messages. IMAP has specific protocol syntax to indicate 8-bit
transfer encoding, and is in fact extensible:
body_fld_enc ::= (<"> ("7BIT" / "8BIT" / "BINARY" / "BASE64"/
"QUOTED-PRINTABLE") <">) / string
Larry